Effective Ways for Intranet Adoption

What is Intranet adoption?

Adoption is about how well your digital workplace platform – that includes your intranet, social tools like Yammer, connected apps, tools, and processes – will be received by your staff. Just because you made it available doesn’t mean employees will gravitate to it automatically.

Why does it matter?

What good is a system if it isn’t used effectively? Intranet adoption is key to the success of digital workplace solution. In the planning phase, decide what problems you are trying to solve, whose problems you are trying to solve and how you will solve them. Every product offers different features. Evaluate the features and decide which product can help you achieve your goals. Educate yourself on the product offering and learn how to tailor it to your organization’s needs to bring business value.

What are the issues?

Many systems have low to moderate levels of intranet engagement. Users continue to use emails for communicating with other members and carry on extensive discussions. Unfortunately, such forms of communications do not add much value to the collective knowledge of the organization. Once the excitement after the deployment of a new intranet dies down, and staff has decided (emotionally rather than intellectually) whether they like it or not, managers and business stakeholders are left to wonder how to drive more traffic and improve intranet engagement. On the other hand, managers expect to quickly see positive changes, even without putting in place a plan to train the staff or raise awareness of how important their engagement and contribution is to the work environment.

What are the best ways to improve intranet adoption?

Well, implementing an intranet is easier than getting the employees to use the intranet. Thankfully, you can increase the intranet adoption rate for your employees and leverage maximum benefits. Start with the following tips and promote the use of intranet in your organization.

1. Launch the company intranet to create a buzz

Generate engagement among employees from the very beginning. Although the intranet objectives are different in every organization but creating enthusiasm about the intranet going live is always a good idea. You can send teaser mails and alike campaigns to raise the awareness about the intranet going live.

2. Use a Phased approach

It is hard to satisfy the needs of the corporation in the first deployment and that may be a cause for dampened enthusiasm. It is best to divide your overall goal into chunks of manageable phases, each with its own focus like communications, training, forms routing /processing, and project /task management. Rather than promoting the product to all, select a group that has the most needs of a features such as collaborating documents. Continue identifying groups and deploying feature by feature. It is easy to measure the value a business process and fine tune the process when it is confined, and its application is well understood. With success in each phase, employees begin to recognize its value of an intranet and start relating to their own work. Slowly, a culture slowly emerges where efficient practices are conceived and become part of the routine for most employees.

3. Make it useful for critical business processes

If all the regular business workflows and processes are facilitated through intranet like leave applications, expenses submission, checking the employee benefits, the intranet adoption is more likely to increase among employees.

Plan your intranet well so that the employees tend to increase intranet adoption for different reasons. Make a list of tasks of employees that are done on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis and convert all paper-based activities into digital via intranet.

4. Central point for business news and content

To grow intranet adoption, emphasize the benefits of valuable content and encourage employees to create and share information and knowledge that others can use in their work. Employees are drawn to good, useful content that they can find easily and which they can used to enhance their productivity.

5. Avoid “One-Size-Fits-All” approach

This approach does not give customization options to employees and necessary features are not always good enough. Some personalization options like changing the header, look and feel of intranet, web parts for specific use can make a big difference in the intranet adoption.

6. Increase intranet advocacy

Identify a few influential people in the organization like managers, business stakeholders and employees who will energize the movement, set an example and motivate others to follow suit.

7. Ongoing evaluation process

Evaluate the effectiveness of the intranet by measuring it against business benefits you expected to meet. This appraisal must be conducted at regular intervals over a pre-determined period to see how increments in the features over time have affected the ROI.

8. Make intranet a fun digital workplace

Some simple team building and rewarding employees can add the much-required fun to your intranet. Some of the ideas to engage with employees are:

Employee Recognition
Featured Employee Feeds for birthdays, anniversaries
Online photo albums for company events, travel photos and more
Sharing of customer appreciations

Start the intranet adoption drive with BizPortals 365

Intranet is not a magic trick to streamline your business but increasing the adoption rate can be your key to the success of intranet solution. BizPortals 365 brings key Office 365 (now renamed Microsoft 365) tools and business applications together, to boost the intranet adoption and employee productivity. Schedule a live demo to discuss your business requirements and see us in action.